A good old Mahometan tradition

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Feb 4, 2013 at 16:13

Hi, dhimmi no more !

> So the picture that emerges from Egypt by the 10th century is an Egypt that was wealthy and the bread basket of the ancient world to a very poor underpopulated country deep into the dark ages and one can only blame the Arabs and their invasion of Egypt <

What you write about Egypt strongly reminds me of Iran after the Arab conquest - a long dark age of a highly developed culture enslaved by an alien barbarian army inspired by a regressive cult. I remember a book which presented the results of excavations of Russian archeologists in the Khorasan area (Transoxania/Bactria) pertaining to the period of early Arab invasions there. The picture of horrors, massacres, plunderings and mass and wanton destruction that later literary sources hint at has been fully borne out by the archaeological evidence on the ground - a thick layer of ashes and broken, cut and scattered human bones and crushed skulls in Sassanid towns and fortresses from around the mid-7th to the early 8th century.

But another point is worth stressing too. What we describe as the Dark Age was a deliberate long-term policy of the Arab invaders.

Al-Biruni in his "Chronology of ancient nations "(p.42) has the following story :

"Kutaiba ben Muslim had extinguished and ruined in every possible way all those who knew how to write and to read the Kwarizmi writing, who knew the history of the country and who studied their sciences . In consequence these things are involved in so much obscurity , that it is impossible to obtain an accurate knowledge of the history of the country since the time of Islam (not to speak of pre-Muhammedan times)."

And Leo Africanus alias El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyati, confesses in his book "The history and description of Africa and the notable things contained therein " (translated by J. Pory , London 1600,v.1, p.166) that :

"For certaine it is that at the same time the Persians lost those letters which were peculiar unto their nation; and that all their books, by the commendement of the Mahumetan prelates, were burnt least their knowledge in natural philosophie or their idolatrous religion might moue them to contemne the precepts of Mahumet".

So first you conquer a territory, plunder it, decimate and enslave its population, make them illiterate and rob them of their identity and past and then introduce your regressive Islam which you declare to be "light" and "a new golden age".

> What is most surprising is that if you examine let us say buildings built by Muslims in the 1st three centuries of Arabian and islamic imperialism you discover that this so called golden age of the umma the Arabs built only one mosque and that is the mosque of Amr Ibn al-As in today's Cairo and historians now believe that the Ibn Tulun Mosque was not built until the 10th century so you get the picture<

Why did they need to build any mosques if there were so many churches to plunder and change into mosques, I wonder ? It's a good old Mahometan tradition to sanction and encourage robbing and changing churches into mosques, isn't it? Besides, what could illiterate nomads that invaded Egypt or Iran or Byzantium build ? A tent in the desert ? And what the Egyptians felt towards Arabs is well illustrated by the symptomatic incident that took place during the great siege of Constantinople by the Arabs in 717/718. The Christian crews from Alexandria defected all to the Greeks even though they knew what horrible fate would befall their relatives left as hostages at home in Egypt.

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